Innocent Bystanders

Unemployment, May 2013: A Big Meh May 3, 2013

April unemployment numbers are out! On the surface the unemployment numbers for April have barely changed: the unemployment rate dropped by another tenth of a point (from 7.6 to 7.5). The Household Survey says this is because we added 293K jobs in April, which would be great if the number of part-time jobs hadn’t gone up by 441K.

That means the last couple of months have shown a small decline in the full-time participation rate (# of full-time employees divided by the civilian non-institutional population), which you can see in the graph I lovingly maintain each month:

The graph says that while the official numbers have improved slightly, the fact is that the employment situation has worsened slightly. You can also see this in the U-6 number, which went up by a tenth of a point (13.8% unemployment to 13.9%).

The Establishment Survey says that we added 165K jobs: 185K in services, and -9K in goods-producing (I sense another “Obama’s Failure to Add 1 Million Manufacturing Jobs” post coming up shortly). The big winners in services were:

Professional Business Services: 73K (31K were temp jobs)

Leisure & Hospitality: 43K

Retail Trade: 29K

Health Services: 26K

Tax time might explain the Professional Business Services number, but I’m not sure why Leisure & Hospitality is doing so well.

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We’ll know for sure in a few more months. Meanwhile, what’s really amazing is how consistently feeble the vaunted recovery has been. It’s taken us 3 years to get 15% of the way back to the pre-recession peak.